This War Is Ours
by sugaredkiwi
Summary: Vergil has been dead a long time. A new leader has overtaken Hell. They have the know-how and technology to resurrect the dead, and the new king of Hell needs a Trojan Horse for everyone's favorite demon hunter. Who better than his very own brother?


"Are you certain Vinea hasn't lost it?" The voice was low where both men bent over the body laid out on the table between them. "This is madness, using one against the other. It's been tried before when this one was still living, and it was a doomed endeavor from the start."

"Bite your tongue, Argath." The other man darted a quick look around, his oddly inverted eyes scanning for eavesdroppers. "He must have his reasons, for he knows of Mundus's failure as well as the rest of us. Just keep your head down and do your job. If it comes down it won't be on us."

Argath gave his friend - a demon by the name of Razel, an uneasy look, but did has he was bid, lifting one of the corpse's limp, cold hands. He bent each finger joint and rotated the wrist before speaking loud enough for the recording equipment to pick up his voice.

"Muscle elasticity is good. Tone concordant with the parameters we were given." There was a pause as he moved to the corpse's head, rolling back one eyelid. "Reflexes will be tested upon resurrection. Soft tissue such as the eyes are in pristine condition."

Razel cut across then. "Amazing, what they did with it." His gloved fingers jabbed at the base of the prone figure's neck. "Cut clean off, from what I heard. Couldn't tell looking at him, eh?"

"Not at all." Argath fell silent a moment. "We should probably get the reanimation started. Our Trojan Horse is no good dead, unless it's to anger that bastard into coming down here."

"He's been down here before." But Razel shrugged, an odd gesture from the demon. "I just wonder if it's possible with this one. Planting the programming was one thing. Reviving memories purposely sealed away by Mundus? Could be a bit of a challenge. And they say this one was no easy one to break." He glanced down at the figure, pale and utterly lifeless between them. "I remember him well. Threw fits you wouldn't believe when he first was captured. Killed a number of good men before they subdued him. What happened to him after...Well. I'm not sure I want to know."

"Of course he's formidable. No reason to reanimate him, otherwise. And the traitor's son will be weak against him." Argath swept to the end of the table, which was actually a rolling gurney of sorts, and began pushing it into the next room, where the reanimation would take place. "Either way, we're to get him up and moving again. He'll be stiff and confused at first. Just remember what we were told."

"Keep the chains on him. Yes. We've been told that. _Repeatedly_." Razel moved ahead of the gurney, to ready the myriad of strange machines awaiting the body they were caretaking. And as he separated tubes he glanced back, rolling his eyes. "Truth be told, I'd rather leave the training to the others. Alas, no rest for the weary, eh?"

Argath snorted. "None whatsoever." A tube, which terminated in a sharp needle, was roughly jabbed into the body's forearm, just below the crook of the elbow. A control knob, similar to that on an outdoor spigot, was turned, and more tubes branching off the main line were placed in the main artery of the neck, one along the inner thigh, and another in the back of a hand. None of it was done gently, but it didn't matter. It was just a dead body.

"There." Razel adjusted the knobs a final time, giving a satisfied nod. "We've done our part, friend. Let's hope the spirit is still willing in that one."

Thus began the waiting period. For a while there would be nothing. Reanimation was a slow, boring process which usually ended in failure. The soul of the creature being revived had to have the want and the drive to do so, or the corpse simply became a mindless, simple zombie. And Vinea would be exceptionally angry if that were the case with the one they'd worked so hard on, to heal and fuse and restore to an unmaimed form.

The hours passed, and the two sat across the room from the body, one occasionally rising and checking it over for any change. Their conversation was kept to a minimum, as there wasn't much to speak of, anyway, and something about being in a room in which _that_ one was to be revived stayed their tongues. He was legendary as a warrior, both before his time in Hell and after.

Hours and hours they sat, waiting for some sign that the beeping, blipping, hissing machines were doing anything at all. Sixteen hours after the vigil began, they did.

It was a finger twitch. Nothing more grandiose than that. Just a simple spasm along an index finger, curling it in on itself before it relaxed. Razel nudged Argath, who'd fallen into a light doze, and nodded in the body's direction. Half an hour later, the muscles along one pale thigh contracted and released, before the torso jerked and air was pulled into lungs that hadn't tasted oxygen in years. It was a horrid, raspy sound; one filled with grave dirt and death.

Two hours later the man was breathing steadily on his own, his muscles retaining a laxness that only a form in sleep has, the eyes rolling in dreams behind the lids. Razel and Argath stood over him, waiting for the moment those eyes would open. That would tell them whether they were successful or not.

Twenty hours into the vigil, the eyes opened. They were a pale, cold blue, and for a moment confusion fogged them, as they roamed the ceiling above their owner, before they came to rest on first one demon's face, and then the other. There they started to darken; the sclera went to the color of pitch, the irises a bright, incandescent red, and both hands shot upward, the long fingers wrapping themselves around the demons' throats.

Argath's own hands immediately flew to the fingers choking off his air, his claws digging into the pale, lukewarm flesh, to no avail, as he was heaved backward, into the wall. Razel found himself flying into the chairs they'd been sitting in, the arm of one impaling him soundly through a shoulder.

The figure sat up and ripped the tubes from his skin, snarling as he did so, black cracks appearing in his flesh, his teeth elongating into fangs. The blood that flew from his own flesh he paid little mind as he stood, steady on his feet and uncaring of his nakedness as he padded his way to Argath, one hand quickly become a claw.

"Where is Yamato."

Argath said nothing, staring up wide-eyed at the man who's white hair fell in tangled knots into his eyes. He was jerked up by the front of his jacket and shaken, but still he couldn't say a word.

"Tell me, _where is my sword_."

"Gone." It was small and choked, and the syllable served only to enrage their subject further, as the other claw dug its way into Argath's chest, seeking the heart. And once finding it, he squeezed, popping the organ like a balloon and dropping the demon's body on the ground before turning to the other, struggling to pry himself from the chair leg.

Razel didn't like the look on the other's face. He wasn't supposed to be like this upon awakening. All research pointed to reanimated beings as being slow, stiff, and docile for the first few hours, but this one...

That thought never finished, as the naked figure blurred out of Razel's vision and reappeared before him, before reaching down and taking him by the jaw, twisting his head off as calmly and quickly as a housewife opening a jar. Dropping the gore of his own making, he glanced down at himself, aware for the first time of his own nakedness. That would have to be remedied. And then?

He was leaving.

It was several hours more before the massacre was discovered, and by the time the alarms were raised, it was far too late. Vergil, son of Sparda, had escaped.


End file.
